Where did first North Americans come from?

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by belovelife

i know, but if it was a continual procees, this may have been an upgrade
if there was travel the whole time, why not use the most efficient form
(all i know is its a huge puzzle, from the cities of the iriqoui
to the top of colorado (makes mount rushmore look small)
and on the colorado they built houses like hobbits

By 4000 years ago the Americas were pretty much already populated, a dribble of a few thousand people from china wouldn't have mattered at all. There is no evidence of a continuous migration over the entire 12 to 16 thousand year period. As for the cities of the Native Americans they pretty much disappeared when disease was introduced by the Spaniards. The entire culture of the Mississippi River was completely gone by the time the anyone else tried to explore that area. Only deserted sites and moldering ruins were found a hundred years later. You need to get your time frames in sync, 500 years ago and 4000 years ago is not a comparable time period. It would be like comparing the revolutionary war to ancient Egypt and trying to say the fall of Egypt was responsible for the revolutionary war in North America.

[Galapagos]

This was published in PLoS ONE around a year ago:
PLoS ONE: A Three-Stage Colonization Model for the Peopling of the Americas

We evaluate the process by which the Americas were originally colonized and propose a three-stage model that integrates current genetic, archaeological, geological, and paleoecological data. Specifically, we analyze mitochondrial and nuclear genetic data by using complementary coalescent models of demographic history and incorporating non-genetic data to enhance the anthropological relevance of the analysis.
[...]
These results support a model for the peopling of the New World in which Amerind ancestors diverged from the Asian gene pool prior to 40,000 years ago and experienced a gradual population expansion as they moved into Beringia. After a long period of little change in population size in greater Beringia, Amerinds rapidly expanded into the Americas ≈15,000 years ago either through an interior ice-free corridor or along the coast. This rapid colonization of the New World was achieved by a founder group with an effective population size of ≈1,000–5,400 individuals. Our model presents a detailed scenario for the timing and scale of the initial migration to the Americas, substantially refines the estimate of New World founders, and provides a unified theory for testing with future datasets and analytic methods.

According to a more recent study, it was two migrations that populated the America:
First Americans arrived as 2 separate migrations, according to new genetic evidence

The first people to arrive in America traveled as at least two separate groups to arrive in their new home at about the same time, according to new genetic evidence published online on January 8th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

After the Last Glacial Maximum some 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, one group entered North America from Beringia following the ice-free Pacific coastline, while another traversed an open land corridor between two ice sheets to arrive directly into the region east of the Rocky Mountains. (Beringia is the landmass that connected northeast Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age.) Those first Americans later gave rise to almost all modern Native American groups of North, Central, and South America, with the important exceptions of the Na-Dene and the Eskimos-Aleuts of northern North America, the researchers said.

Also.... is anyone here familiar with the theory that native Americans were from Israel?

[belovelife]

valid point, i concede
although i've heard of viking tales of trade with the iriquoi
i think it was such a place that it wasn't written about
and that those who knew about it kept it secret
this has probly been going on since the first travelers left africa
have you looked into the genetic mapping of travel
its a pretty good idea
basically through gene mapping it shows trails of the people that live in specific regions on the planet

and also did you ever notice that on viking helmets
(like thor)
they have a feather
now this may just be coincedence
but i think there were tade routes
although i am not sure

edit: wow you wrote that at the same time i did

[Michaelangelica]

I guess I, and others, are guilty of rambling around a few topics ( ) here.
But there seems so little we really know about ancient, and even relatively modern, Amerindians.
It is hard to divide them into N and South now, with the new archaeology -movement may have been both ways.
It is also an area where new stuff, and fascinating, iconoclastic books (like 1491) keep popping up every other day.
PS
1491
has a chapter on the various academic arguments around this topic.
i am not sure if I completely followed it, as I have not studied any American History.

[belovelife]

i don't think you are off topic
were there off topic post in the past

[Michaelangelica]

The fellow who sailed with Cook was Tupaia.

Tupaia's Chart map catalogued in the British Museum as a 'Chart of the Society Islands with Otaheite in the centre July-Aug 1769' was brought back from Cook’s voyages in the Pacific. By reading this chart traditional Pacific navigators conceived of their sea environment.

Some info about him and his navigation prowess here
Quests of the Dragon and Bird Clan: Glossary: Tupaia's Map

So to try and relate this to the topic. is there any genetic evidence that amerindians came accross the Pacific? All very tenuous & late
I know.- The best evidence for Polynesian- Americas contact I have found so far is the humble chook.
Wiki says

by about 700 AD, the Polynesians had settled the vast Polynesian triangle with its northern corner at Hawai'i, the eastern corner at Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the southern corner in New Zealand. By comparison, Viking navigators first settled Iceland around 875 AD. The Polynesian voyagers reached the South American mainland and there are suggestions that they made contact with indigenous South Americans. Carbon-dating of chicken bones found by Chilean archaeologists on the Arauco Peninsula in south-central Chile date from between 1321 and 1407 AD. DNA analysis of the bones match those found in prehistoric samples from Tonga and American Samoa, and a near identical match from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The sweet potato, known in Polynesian languages as kumara or kumala is widely grown around the Pacific but originated in the Andes. There are also linguistic similarities - sweet potato is kumar in Peru.
There is no conclusive evidence that Pacific peoples actually settled on the South American mainland or that South American peoples voyaged into the Pacific.

Polynesian culture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 1803 Martinez de Zuniga published a history of the Philippines in which he asserted that the people of Polynesia and many other Pacific Islands, including the Philippines, spoke languages closely related to those of South America,
. . .
From this homeland region, now called West Polynesia, the trail of artifacts leads to the archipelagos of central East Polynesia-the Cooks, Societies, Australs, Tuamotus and Marquesas, and then from there to the distant islands of Hawai'i, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa. In all the hundreds of excavations conducted throughout Polynesia, no prehistoric pottery or other ancient artifacts that can be directly traced to either North or South America have been uncovered. Although the pre-European cultivation by Polynesians of the sweet potato, a plant of South American origin, indicates that there must have been some communication between the Americas and Polynesia, the archaeological record demonstrates that Polynesians are descended from seafarers who moved eastward across the Pacific from the western edge of the ocean.

Chickens came from SE Asia